#Prosoft drive genius for mac 10.15 mac os
#Prosoft drive genius for mac 10.15 install

There are also some curious mismatches between Disk Utility on Intel Macs, compared with Apple Silicon Macs. An example of this is information about the seal on System volumes and their snapshots, which isn’t revealed by Disk Utility, only the diskutil apfs command. With the availability of command tools, Apple has pursued a policy of giving limited access to features in its utility apps, forcing many users to resort to Terminal for anything more advanced.

#Prosoft drive genius for mac 10.15 mac os

Some apps, like ResEdit, provided advanced users with far greater power then any equivalent in Mac OS X. In Classic Mac OS, when there was no command line, system tools had to be complete and often supported advanced features. Judging by Time Machine’s behaviour, it can also make snapshots of only a part of volume, a major new feature which isn’t yet accessible to users or third-party developers as far as I’m aware.Ĭhecking and repair of snapshots is performed within Disk Utility’s First Aid feature, or in fsck_apfs, although neither the man page nor usage information for that command tool even mentions snapshots, and don’t appear to have been revised for nearly three years. If that’s true, then control over boot volume groups isn’t going to appear in either Disk Utility or its command tool companion.Ĭopying individual storage blocks to backups is one of several major new features used by Big Sur’s Time Machine when backing up to APFS volumes, none of which appears to have been documented.

This suggests that the features underlying boot Volume Groups, such as firmlinks, have to be created when the System volume is itself being created.

#Prosoft drive genius for mac 10.15 install

The great advance in performing a clean install of macOS came in later releases of Catalina, since which the macOS installer has been able to link a fresh System volume with an existing Data volume, something which previously often failed, and created multiple Data volumes with names like Macintosh HD – Data and Macintosh HD – Data – Data.Īpple’s current solution to repairing or changing boot Volume Groups is to reinstall macOS with the single correctly-named Data volume present in the container. This makes a clean install simpler and less confusing, although it also makes it easier for users to inadvertently erase a wanted Data volume, when all they intend to do is create a new System volume which is linked to an existing Data volume. One significant improvement in Big Sur is the ability of Disk Utility to erase a complete Volume Group in a single operation. Although its command tool companion, diskutil, offers a few more facilities, such as the creation of APFS volumes with specified roles, even there the user has comparatively little to work with APFS’s extensive feature-set. These include volume roles, Volume Groups, firmlinks, and the copying of storage blocks into backups.ĭespite those, Disk Utility in Big Sur has changed precious little, and can’t for example swap the Data volume in a boot volume group. By the time it has reached version 1677.60.23 in Big Sur, it has grown many new features, of which most support the new Sealed System Volume, and Time Machine backups to APFS volumes. Over the last few years, since the introduction of APFS, we’ve become ever more reliant on it, but it hasn’t always delivered the goods.ĪPFS has developed rapidly since we first started getting to know it in High Sierra. The day when you can’t rely on it to format disks correctly we’re all doomed. Disk Utility is the least glamorous and most critical of all the apps bundled in macOS.